In Garry Winogrand Exhibit, a Completed Body of American Work

John F. Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960.

Few museum exhibits offer an occasion to actually complete an artist’s body of work. But a retrospective of the legendary street photographer Garry Winogrand now at the National Gallery of Art offers a rare exception by displaying haunting, unconventional portraits of mid-20th-century America — many of which weren’t developed or known to exist before his death in 1984.

A tenacious New Yorker who preferred stalking subjects to toiling in the darkroom, Winogrand was part of a generation of shooters including Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander who changed the direction of the medium by pushing it into the realm of fine art. His centrifugal compositions, tilted horizons and mysterious detail work juxtaposed the hope and optimism of post-World War II America with a growing sense of anxiety and alienation, according to Sarah Greenough, a National Gallery senior curator and head of the museum’s department of photographs.

Winogrand made no attempt to publish a summary of his work before he died of cancer at 56 — indeed, he was so busy capturing images that he never printed or edited thousands of his own pictures. The exhibit draws on 4,100 rolls of unreviewed, mostly black-and-white film and another 2,500 rolls that weren’t even developed. Other photos are drawn from Winogrand’s archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

The 190 images in the show contain iconic subjects such as rodeo cowboys, politicians, gaudy cars and airplanes often in wide shots that strew visual elements about in a random but epic way.

“It was like Walt Whitman: You saw the entirety of American life unfolding in front of you,” said photographer Leo Rubinfien, who worked with Winogrand for a decade and served as a guest curator for the exhibit. “It’s hard to tell whether you’re looking at one man’s view or the spirit of a nation.”

The almost profligate, disorganized way in which Winogrand burned through film searching for spontaneous drama was, in some ways, an antecedent to today’s world of smart phones, selfies and Facebook posts. What was special was the sophisticated imagery he found in seemingly mundane subjects, notes Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in an essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibit. A photo of people fishing on the Klamath River in California features a boy in the foreground locked in a quizzical pose, with the curve of the river framing the figures from above. An image of a woman looking at her car in a suburban garage uses dark shadows to transform both vehicle and owner into a kind of sculptural frieze.

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March 13, 2015

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., right, hugs Harold Schaitberger, General President of the International Association of Fire Fighters, after the Congressman spoke at the IAFF's Legislative Conference General Session at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill, March 9, 2015. The day featured addresses by members of Congress and Vice President Joe Biden.